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About Scott

Since first falling into geek-dom with his Commodore 64 as a boy, Scott Bateman has spent most of his life programming and working with computers. Presently the Senior Product Architect for Quorum Business Solutions in Houston, Scott is responsible for the technical health of the Upstream product suite serving Fortune 500 oil and gas companies. Scott holds a BS in Computer Science from Trinity University which has guided him through a decade of development including Windows, web, database, and handheld applications.

Mantra

Depending on whether you are more of a developer or more of a DBA you may care more or less about this next feature. However, anyone can benefit from it. SSMS 2008 makes it very easy to crack open the Activity Monitor as there is a noticeable button right on the toolbar.

Once inside you get a few charts, as well as some tables of performance related data below. This is clearly not as exciting on my local Vista machine as it would be on a pounded production database, but you can see where the power of a tool like this could come in handy.

Each of the charts represents these metrics:

% Processor Time

Waiting Tasks

Database I/O

Batch Requests/Sec

Probably the most interesting feature to me is the Recent Expensive Queries table. This allows you to dynamically analyze the most impacting queries against your server. Since the impact can be determined by a number of factors, it allows you to sort by:

Executions

CPU

Physical Reads

Logical Writes

Logical Reads

Average Duration

Plan Count

Even cooler, you can drill into the actual query itself with a right-click option: